Abhishek Roy (Kolkata, India) shares the story of his struggle with us.

My father tried a lot to get me into a gym because I was a very thin and weak child, but he gracefully failed. 17th August 2015 was the day when I actually started gymming, not to become a bodybuilder but to fight my depression. ( I won’t go much into it but I’ll just let you guys know that I joined the gym only to survive and fight depression). So, it was my first day and when I met the trainer the first thing he asked me was if I was ready for the 14 days challenge. “What the hell is that?”, I asked him. His reply was simple, “Survive the pain of discipline. If you survive it then you can go through any pain in life”. After 6-7 months I realised he was right. Gymming teaches you many lessons of life and those are-

Keep your bad attitude and over confidence out of business.

The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.

Do not stop when it hurts, stop when you’re done.

Pain is temporary what you will gain is permanent.

Failure is the pillar of success, if you haven’t tasted failure then you’ll never feel the happiness of success

And lastly, excuses will never let you succeed.

What I’ve ultimately learned is “Fitness is like a marriage, you can’t cheat on it and expect it to work.”

Trust me, when I started off I used to hate the pain. I also got bullied by people because I wasn’t strong enough to lift 2.5 kg of weights on both sides of a bar and do a bench press. But my trainer kept motivating me. He said “ghayal sher jada khatarnak hota hain.. so karta ja.. hoyega ekdin” ( a wounded lion is more dangerous.. So keep going.. You’ll succeed one day). And eventually months passed by and I succeeded, it was the greatest happiness that I’ve ever felt.

What I want to tell you is that “whatever your passion is, it might be gymming , dancing, painting, music or anything that you love, never let go of your passion, work hard until you succeed.”And I’ve heard many people say that they don’t get time to follow their passion or they aren’t motivated enough, to them I want to say “24 hours makes a day, finding 2 hours for your passion is not a big deal and after those 2 hours the happiness that you’ll feel will be the greatest happiness of your life”. Now, coming to the motivation part- no one can motivate until you yourself don’t want to get motivated. A million people will say a million things but it’s up to you whether you want to get motivated or not.

The purpose was to tell you about how exercises effects your life and what it teaches you. It’ll keep you healthy, will give you positive vibes, make you strong from not only from the outside but from the inside. And most importantly, it’ll keep you happy.